Summer League

OC Beach Ultimate Summer League is in full swing! The 8 week season runs June 5- July 24, 2014. We play Thursdays at 6pm on Somerset St. in Downtown OC. Full 8-week cost is $25 and players will get an official OCBU Discraft and an end of the season party. In town for vacation? Just pay a $5 drop in and come ball on the beach. All skill levels welcome!

Announcement: Beach Summer League 2015

Announcing Ocean City Beach Ultimate Summer League 2015!!!!

What and Where?

Beach ultimate is a non-contact sport played on a 75m x 25m field. We are playing a 10 week season from June 4th to August 6, 2015. Games are held every Thursday evening at 6pm in Downtown OC ON THE BEACH in-front of Somerset St (right next to the Ferris Wheel). We play a minimum of 2 games, usually until dark.

Who?

We welcome every kind of player 16 and older including beginners, college players, locals, ultimate dads and moms, and club level players. NEW PLAYERS are always encouraged to come out. Your awesome teammates will help you learn the game. Have fun, get exercise, and meet new people! Games are co-ed, so men and women play together.

We welcome the traveling ultimate player too! If you are in town for a vacation or conference, come by and play for a small drop in fee.

Format:

We play 5 on 5 BULA rules. For 4 weeks, we will mix up teams so players can play with and meet different people and teach the basics of ultimate to the group and any new players. Then in week 5 we will form teams which we will keep together for a 6 week season. Your team will have a captain, ~8 people, and a team color. Please wear that color every week.

Cost/What you get:

The cost of the league is $60 per person. With registration you will receive a fresh summer league JERSEY, an OCBU DISC, and a 10 WEEK season! Water is provided every week. We will have a social event on the last week of the season with food and beverages for players, and beer for players 21+.

Four Months of Beach Ultimate

Its October in OCMD. The beaches have cleared, the first wave of crisp autumn air has come, and with it the official end of summer.

Growth

The change of season triggers a reflection of the past summer. This was a big year for ultimate down here on the shore. What began as a grass pickup game among friends has grown into… an actual league! Just 2 years ago we struggled to get 7 on 7 one day a week, now we have 2 grass pickup games (Berlin and Salisbury), and 2 league games (OC Beach and Fall Berlin) supported by over 30 players. Players can even pick and choose their games: some only play grass, others devoted to the beach, some play all 3 days a week.

I wrote a piece earlier this summer on the International Players who became part of the OCBU family. Adding to that list we had 2 former Salisbury University players come through visiting from Singapore and Latvia respectively.

We also hosted the Boracay Dragons for 2 weeks during their US Tour which included 3 team practices in OC and Assateague, and a couple friendly matches against the top OCBU players. “The sand is the nicest here. This is a real beach,” Dragons Coach Wendell Simbulan praised. This is coming from a team that has played all over the WORLD!

Club and college ultimate players also found their way down to OCBU. We had college players drop in from WVU, UMD, and IUP in Pennsylvania. Some by accident, others knew there was a game before they came on vacation. Several club players from around Maryland came to join in on the action fairly regularly, and some of Boston’s Elite from Ironside and the women’s team Brute Squad.

Epic Week 4 as Russ Wallack of Boston Ironside came to town to film with Morrill Performance, The Dew Tour skate bowl set up next to our fields, and Mike Malloy gets this stunning layout D.

The most rewarding part of this growth is the handful of locals who started playing ultimate here at OCBU. We were lucky enough to introduce the sport to several high schoolers, and even some post-college folks who are now hooked. I never thought I’d see the day when a college ultimate player will tell his/her teammates “I started playing in OC.” Our game which began as a bunch of ultimate transplants is now beginning our second generation of grassroots players.

Tournament

August 9-10, 2014 we hosted the FIRST EVER ultimate tournament in Ocean City, the OC Beach Classic. Over 120 players on 11 teams participated in the two day event. Several Maryland teams were represented with other squads coming from New Jersey, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh. The Boracay Dragons won the inaugural title after beating Humiliswag, an East Coast-based competitive beach ultimate team, 15-12.

Words cannot fully express how huge the first year of this tournament was. The Town of OC was 100% supportive and was excited to not only be introduced to ultimate, but to see a new event in town after years of the same car fests, bike fests, beer fests, and sun fests. Furthermore, in our meeting with the Town Council, we found out that brand new athletic fields are being built and that Worcester County wants to hold more sporting events in the years to come. #grasstournament

OC Beach Classic Teams 2014. One love!

Throughout the tournament, people were shocked and very stoked to see beach ultimate in action. Saturdays showcase game was played in front of about 300 people, all boardwalk passersby. I regularly saw people asking a player “what is this?” and that player explaining in a very professional and respectable manner: its beach ultimate. Thank you to the teams who believed in this tournament, played as hard as you did, and made the plays you did. It was personally a dream come true, and great for our sport.

Four Months

On October 2nd a couple of us gathered for the weekly Thursday pickup beach ultimate game which fell short of numbers: only 4 people. This was a bummer, but as we threw we were greeted by a massive arching double rainbow over the Atlantic Ocean. Looking up at this masterpiece I realized we had played beach ultimate every Thursday from June 5 to September 25: 2 months of league and 2 months of pickup, and this rainbow signaled the end of the 2014 beach ulti season. I remembered every player that had come from far corners of the globe to the beach in Downtown OC knowing they had a game of ultimate here. I wondered who we would meet next summer. I wonder what next year’s “4 months” will look like.

Incredible and fitting end to the 2014 OCBU season.

Summer League: International Perspective

This spring I had the experience of a lifetime when I joined Tim Morrill on the Morrill Performance Asia Tour. The 6 week trip included stops in Singapore, Perth (Australia), Bali (Indonesia), Manila, and Boracay (Phillipines). Our mission was to educate Ultimate teams on his Functional Training Model by leading 2 clinics: Strength and Power in the weight room and Speed and Agility on the pitch. This was the first time I had left the country in 6 years, was my first trip to Asia, and my first Ultimate-related international travel. I was leaving my Maryland home in Chesapeake Bay Country aka Slower Lower Delaware for the great unknown.

I ate pig intestine, huge delicious crabs, stayed in a 5 star hotel, and met an amazing community of Ultimate players in bustling Singapore. Benjamin Ho of Ultysports is leading the charge there as he coaches up to 5 teams and organizes several tournaments each year for College and Club.

Sublime Ultimate out of Perth could very well be my long lost brothers as we trained hard, played in the ocean, and grilled on the beach with some local Emu Ales: the perfect day. Same goes for KAOS, Perth’s women’s team who threw down an awesome Speed and Agility session on a sweltering summer day. We were there for 3 short days and I cannot wait to return Down Under.

Timbo and I utilized 2-man Beach training drills in Indo and bodysurfed pumping waves for a week of r and r and fresh fruit shakes. Those sunsets over the Indian Ocean will forever live in my memory, the whole town comes out to the beach for the golden hour. Manila has a mega-city feel and once again we were taken in by the Ultimate players like family. Our final stop was the island paradise that is Boracay, a home away from home. We got to live, train, and play with the Dragons for 9 days which included the Boracay Open International Frisbee Tournament. (More to come on the Legend of the Dragons.)

Emiliano with a late game layout.

International travel gives you a better perspective of the world. Where you came from, where you are going, and the paths of our fellow man all make the world seem like a smaller place. At each stop, it felt like I had known the Ultimate players in a past life. We just clicked with each team like we had done these clinics with them before even though it was brand new material for almost all of the athletes. Even though we were from opposite corners of the globe, Ultimate players are the same no matter where you go: open, inviting, and fun.

With the trip over and back accounts exhausted, it came time for me to return to the States. Tim would continue on through Europe playing a Beach Ultimate Tour, and I set to work organizing a Beach Ultimate Tournament and the first ever Beach Summer League here in Ocean City, Maryland. I rallied the local players by ramping up our Facebook page Ocean City Beach Ultimate. As our “likes” began to increase and word got out that there was a beach ulti-summer league, I was contacted by all sorts of players I never knew existed on the Eastern Shore: beginner high schoolers, emerging college players, and curious post-grads who knew of Ultimate but never had an outlet to play. The Ultimate scene virtually did not exist here a few years ago and has been steadily on the rise. This influx of new players was encouraging and an early success of my efforts to grow the Summer League and the community at-large.

Ocean City has a history of employing many European and International college-age people looking to travel abroad and live at the beach. It did not click until Monika and Kamile emailed me from Lithuania about the League that I would continue to gain international perspective here in my home town. Next along came Emiliano, a player from the team Malaki out of Mexico. Finally, Mustafa, a third-year college Ultimate player contacted me from Turkey. Each of these players was preparing to embark on the same mystery as I had when I set out to meet Tim in Singapore; they were all headed to OC for the summer.

Monika marking Kamile on the beach in OC. Lietuva!

Getting to play with each of them for these first 6 weeks of OCBU has been an amazing experience. For Monika, Kamile, and Emiliano, this is their first time in the US and creating a place for them to play Ultimate has been beyond rewarding. I see it as a chance to pay it forward. After receiving such incredible hospitality diring our entire Asia Tour, it really feels good to be able to reciprocate the Ultimate love to travelers on my home turf. These people from other parts of the world, our fellow Ultimate players, have found a home at OCBU for the summer. With the fear of the unknown, there is also comfort in having a game of Ultimate awaiting.

Good luck to Cracker Jacks (Open) and Skiok (Mixed) from Singapore; Sublime (Open) and KAOS (Womens) from Perth at World Ultimate Club Championships; and the Boracay Dragons (Open and Mixed) for World Championships of Beach Ultimate 2015 in Dubai. Let the good vibes keep going as thousands of players travel to Lecco and beyond in our own Ultimate quests.